Body odors offer a unique window into the physiological and psychological profile of the emitter. This information, broadcast in nonverbal communication, significantly shapes social interactions. However, effectively digitizing body odors requires a precise framework for perceptual operationalization. Previous research has used a very limited number of verbal terms, such as pleasant, intense, or attractive, which fails to adequately capture qualitative differences. To address this gap, we elicited body odor descriptions from 2,607 participants across 17 countries and 13 languages. All these descriptions are presented here in one dataset, together with a condensed list of 25 body odor words (BOW). Those terms reliably differentiated between body states, and were validated in a separate study with a different group of 155 perceivers. The dataset, available as a web application, provides a novel operationalization of body odor impressions, which is a precondition for studying olfaction in human nonverbal communication, for perception-based digitization of body odors and for comparative studies.

Centre for the Study of Labour and Human Factors University of Valparaíso Valparaíso Chile

Clinic and Polyclinic for Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics Faculty of Medicine and University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus TUD Dresden University of Technology Dresden Germany

Department for General Psychology Institute of Psychology Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena Jena Germany

Department of Behavioral Medicine Institute of Basic Medical Sciences Faculty of Medicine University of Oslo Oslo Norway

Department of Clinical Neuroscience Karolinska Institutet Stockholm Sweden

Department of Clinical Psychology Institute of Psychology Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena Jena Germany

Department of Experimental Psychology University of Oxford Oxford UK

Department of Psychology Hebrew University of Jerusalem Jerusalem Israel

Department of Psychology The Chinese University of Hong Kong Hong Kong Hong Kong

Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences Tampere University Tampere Finland

German Center for Mental Health site Halle Jena Magdeburg Halle Jena Magdeburg Germany

Hotchkiss Brain Institute and Department of Psychiatry University of Calgary Calgary Canada

Institute for Materials Science Technische Universität Dresden Dresden Germany

Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic Prague Czech Republic

Institute of Physical Chemistry Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena Jena Germany

Institute of Psychology University of Wroclaw Wroclaw Poland

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Leipzig Germany

School of Business Administration Hebrew University of Jerusalem Jerusalem Israel

School of Humanities and Social Sciences Indian Institute of Technology Indore Indore India

Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry Western University London ON Canada

Smell and Taste Clinic Department of Otorhinolaryngology Technische Universität Dresden Dresden Germany

University of Innsbruck Innsbruck Austria

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A standardized lexicon of body odor words crafted from 17 countries